Traditionally, the manufacturing of a lens for use in eyeglasses requires a number of steps, including:                choosing a semi-finished lens blank with a finished front surface (base curve) and an unfinished back surface,        grinding the back surface with a lathe, such as a toric lathe, that creates a spherical concave or convex surface (such as a cylindrical or spherical surface) on the back surface to place an optical system on the surface used to correct the vision of a user of eyeglasses, and        lapping the back surface to smooth the surface to a desired curvature to finish the optical system.        
Typically, the curvature of the back surface is limited to the size of the lap piece. For example, laps are generally produced to create curvatures on lens surfaces. The laps are formed to produce a specific curvature on a surface, although curvatures placed on different corrective lenses, due to the inherent limitations of creating the laps, may be incrementally different (that is, the minimum difference in curvature between two lenses may be around 0.125 diopters). Thus, using lathes and laps, the creation of surfaces on lens has often been limited in surface type (generally spherical surfaces) and in specification of the curvature (generally incremental from one lens to a next lens).
Additionally, lenses having a strong prescription (such as those requiring large radii of curvature) are often bulky and inconvenient to a user wearing eyeglasses with such lenses. These users may suffer from the “coke bottle effect,” where the thickness of the lens causes the eyeglasses (and the user wearing them) to look unattractive at the periphery of the lenses. These and other problems exist with respect to current eyeglass lens manufacturing.